GFI Software has confirmed the purchase of sometimes controversial spam blocklist provider SORBS for a reported $451,000.
Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS) has maintained a list of email servers suspected of sending or relaying spam since 2002. Inefficiencies in its spam blocklist database removal procedure, a …

Wot, in addition to the great Oz Barrier Firewall?

SORBed

We long ago removed SORBS lookup from our spam filter because we judged it to be more trouble than it was worth. If it's been sold, perhaps we'll look at it again. First we'll give it five years to settle down.

SORBS overblocked me

SORBS has an ugly "fuck you" policy for spamlisting. I found myself inside one of their listed IP blocks, and found out that they do not honor or maintain any kind of blacklists. This of course means that the only way to get "unblocked" is to pay their $50 fine to unblock the entire netblock I reside in, or wait for SORBS to auto-delist the block. The first option would obviously not work, as whoever's actually spamming on said block will keep on spamming, and get the whole block to get listed again; and the second one, well, I doubt the spammers will cease to spam.

Thanks to this policy, I've discouraged SORBS whenever I can. In these days of colocation and IPv4 address shortages, I can't really decide on who's going to be my IP neighbor.